In July, we announced the inaugural Taiko Community Grant Program focused on discovering and supporting innovative community members who build up and build on the Taiko ecosystem. Today, we’re beyond excited to announce the grant winners! 🥳

But first, let’s take a look at some numbers.

Community-first approach

In the span of just over a month, we received 92 grant applications — a number larger than expected. The majority of the applications were of high quality, and we needed extra time to go through them carefully. All of this, for better or for worse, slightly delayed our internal processes and the announcement of the winners.

Out of the total 92 grant applications, 15 have been awarded grants. Out of those 15 winners, 9 had already deployed on or contributed to Taiko in some capacity before applying for a grant. We’re especially proud of this achievement and see it as a confirmation of our efforts in fostering an open, community-led builder environment, as well as a sign of our commitment to support projects that meaningfully contribute to the Taiko ecosystem retroactively.

We want to whole-heartedly thank every single team that applied for a Taiko grant. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you and your eagerness to build in the open.

Now let’s announce the winners of the inaugural Taiko Community Grant Program!

Winners

Zero-Knowledge Proofs

SuperScalar* (GitHub, X) is a company specializing in cutting-edge computing acceleration solutions for zero-knowledge proof generation. The team aims to deliver a GPU acceleration baseline solution to the Taiko community, including MSM, NTT, Evaluator, and others. They’ll also be working on an FPGA-based prover and designing a ZKP-proving benchmark tool, including test cases, log analysis, and hardware platform.

Polyhedra Network (Website, X) is a company that designs and develops scalable and efficient zero-knowledge proof protocols for large-scale ZKP systems with distributed computing networks. The team is going to continue to work on implementing zkBridge on Taiko and connect more chains to Taiko, as well as do additional research.

Proof Markets

Prover Pool (GitHub, X) is a project that lowers the barrier to becoming a block prover on Taiko. Grassets Tech, the team behind the project, is going to further polish the prover tool by providing different options for prospective provers, as well as potentially produce a framework for creating multiple pools with different tokenomics and rewards economies.

ZKPool (GitHub, X) is a project that is focused on providing a decentralized accelerated computation layer for Ethereum. The team is going to continue to build a proof market for the Taiko ecosystem to achieve low and transparent proving costs, lower the barrier for provers, and ensure maximum rewards.

Games

FREDD Studios (Website, X) is a gaming studio behind the web3 RPG game StupidMonkeys Realm Hero. The team is going to work on developing the PvP mode of the game. They will also be releasing an NFT collection of 8,000 in-game assets, as well as organizing events and competitions for the Taiko community.

SporeForge (X) is a gaming studio behind Taikoverse, a Minecraft-like game that was deployed on Taiko L3. The team is going to work on developing a second game for the Taiko community.

Education and Community Efforts

Dojo Node (GitHub, X) is an easy-to-read, user-friendly dashboard to assist with operating a Taiko node. The people behind the project are some of the earliest Taiko community members and deployed Dojo Node on Taiko months ago. The team is going to continue developing the tool, add new functionalities, and develop extensive documentation, among other plans.

The Rollup (Website, X) is a media company that represents a community of power users in DeFi and L2. The team is going to work on a video series of interviews, concept explainers, and other types of video content. They’ll also organize various community events and competitions.

AI Integration

BrianAI (Website, X) is the first non-custodial AI assistant that facilitates access to the web3 ecosystem for everyone by solving two main problems: UX and knowledge fragmentation. The project has already been deployed on the Taiko testnet since June when BrianAI won a Taiko bounty at the ETHPrague hackathon. The team is going to work on developing further functionalities and increasing user adoption.

Surprise Us

FLock.io (GitHub, X) is a startup aiming to create an on-chain neural processor. The team is going to work on establishing a decentralized machine-learning community on Taiko, and enabling the collaborative development of advanced ML models.

Offch is a project that’s going to work on mitigating the issue of expensive DAO voting participation on L1 by developing a trustless off-L1 multi-governance solution.

DevPool (GitHub) is an AI-powered crypto-native DAO-building platform and marketplace developed by UbiquityDAO. The team is going to work on enabling NFT and POAP payments on GitHub, as well as later deploying on Taiko.

Taiko subgraphs on The Graph network (GitHub, X) is another project developed by the Grassets Tech team. The project aims to create Taiko subgraphs on The Graph network for easy access to blockchain data using subgraphs and GraphQL queries. The Grassets Tech team has been indexers for The Graph since 2018 and is uniquely positioned to deliver.

Sentio (Website, X) is a web3 observability platform that generates real-time metrics, logs, and traces from existing smart contracts data to build dashboards, set up alerts, and more. The team is going to deploy on Taiko testnet and later mainnet.

Gourds Studio (X) provides innovative DeFi solutions based on TradFi products, like a gamified exotic options trading protocol already deployed on the Taiko testnet. The team will continue polishing the product and deploy it on Taiko mainnet.

*Disclosure:** Taiko co-founder and CEO Daniel Wang is an investor in SuperScalar. This was disclosed from the outset to the Taiko Grant Committee, which has sole discretion to review and approve grant proposals. No members of the founding team are part of the Grant Committee.

Congratulations to the winners! We can’t wait to start (or continue 🙂) building with you!

What’s next?

Taiko is all about open-source, community-driven building, and the inaugural Taiko Community Grant Program proved that we are taking the right approach. Your interest and eagerness to build alongside Taiko have inspired us and, hopefully, the broader Ethereum ecosystem.

That is why we are committed to staying in contact with the newly-minted Taiko grantees and supporting them throughout their journeys.

As for those who missed the first grant program: We want to continue to empower our community and form long-term relationships with our builders. That’s why a second Taiko grant program is already in the works. So stay tuned!

Thank you again to all grant applicants and congratulations to the winners. See you soon!

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